Mexico City

One song at a time

At Plaza Garibaldi, listeners can hire a mariachi group to play a song. The city’s tourism guide describes people arriving at the square to continue a celebration or seek consolation after disappointment in love, paying the musicians for what they request. The choice of song can turn a public square into the setting for a personal dedication.

Mariachi’s roots lie in western Mexico, including Jalisco. In the capital, Garibaldi became one of the places where musicians and audiences met; the nearby Salón Tenampa is part of that history.

A wedding in the vecindad

Chava Flores, born in La Merced, wrote about the people and customs of the capital. In “Boda de vecindad”, Tacho marries Tencha, the neighbour from number eight. The building’s shared spaces and preparations turn the wedding into an event for the vecindad, a community living around a common courtyard.

In “Sábado, Distrito Federal”, Flores turns to a different ritual: the end of the working week. The song moves through traffic, crowded shops and queues at pawnshops as the working week gives way to Saturday in the capital.

A dance floor and a microphone

Flores’s wedding takes place among neighbours. In Salón Los Ángeles, people gather to dance to orchestras and styles including danzón. The hall has been part of Mexico City’s social dance culture for decades.

Dance also found a home in street parties organised around sound systems. A sonidero selects records, operates the equipment and speaks over the music, sending greetings to people on the floor. In the 1970s, collectors from Peñón de los Baños travelled to Colombia in search of cumbia records and brought them back for the capital’s sound systems.

Sonido La Changa, founded by Ramón Rojo Villa and associated with Tepito, is one such sound system.

A passenger who cannot get off

In “El metro”, Café Tacvba take an ordinary journey to an absurd extreme. A passenger is so trapped by the crowd that he passes stations without managing to leave the train. He imagines months going by underground; Zócalo and Hidalgo are among the places named in the song.

Emmanuel del Real wrote the track for Re, released in 1994. The band formed in Ciudad Satélite, in neighbouring Naucalpan, outside Mexico City proper. The recording opens with a metro warning sound, according to a published study of music and urban experience.

Words from the street

Two years after Re, Café Tacvba released a version of “Chilanga banda”, a song by Jaime López. López had first recorded it with José Manuel Aguilera. Its densely packed Mexico City slang follows an urban character through work, the street and encounters with authority.

Rooms for independent music

Before those recordings, Café Tacvba and Maldita Vecindad played at LUCC, a Mexico City venue that also hosted Caifanes and other emerging bands. LUCC closed in 1992.

Multiforo Alicia later offered space for independent concerts as well as poetry, workshops and political events. Its original home in Roma closed in 2023; the project reopened in Santa María la Ribera in 2024.

For the last song, return to Chava Flores’s wedding. Tencha’s address — number eight — is enough to place the celebration among the neighbours of a vecindad.